Thursday, July 18, 2013

Former Vinik exec starts Kopernik Global Investors

We aren't in the habit of commenting on individual firms, especially start-ups, but this one may be special.
From our July 2012 post "Billionaire Vinik Buying into Bakken Play Continental Resources (CLR)":
Mr. Vinik (Tampa Bay Lightning, Liverpool Football Club) is probably best known for barely beating the S&P when he was at Fidelity Magellan (83.70% to 77.79%/4 years).
He left and started showing off. Tampa Bay Times: 
Who is Jeff Vinik?
Best known for managing the Fidelity Magellan mutual fund in the early 1990s. … After an ill-timed move out of stocks, he left Magellan in 1996, starting a highly successful hedge fund with Vinik Asset Management. He made investors a reported 93.8 percent return in his first 11 months (and about 50 percent a year for each of the three years after that). … At the end of 2000, he returned investors about $4.2 billion and concentrated on his own portfolio. ...
From Pensions & Investments:
Kopernik Global Investors, a global equity investment management firm, was launched July 1 by David Iben, former head of the global value group at hedge fund manager Vinik Asset Management, according to a news release from Kopernik.

The 20-person investment team at Kopernik had made up the majority of the global value group at Vinik Asset Management. Some of the team members also had worked with Mr. Iben when he was co-president and chief investment officer at Nuveen Investments' Tradewinds Global Investors.

Founder Jeff Vinik closed Vinik Asset Management last month to focus on charitable work and the Tampa Bay Lightning, the professional hockey team he bought in 2010. Mr. Iben left Tradewinds to join Vinik Asset Management in June 2012.

The new firm was named after Mikolaj Kopernik, known by his Latin name, Nicolaus Copernicus, the Polish-born mathematician and astronomer who said the sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the universe.

Kassim Gaffar, spokesman for Kopernik, said the firm manages long-short and global all-cap equity strategies for Mr. Vinik as well as for “friends and family” of staff members, but the firm is also marketing its strategies to institutional investors.
— Contact Rick Baert at rbaert@pionline.com | @Baert_PI
Finally from Bloomberg, March 13, 2012:
Vinik Hedge Fund Recruits Top-Ranked David Iben From Nuveen